2 Simple, Crucial Water Reforms

We can see it more clearly every day: California does not have enough water to meet everyone’s demands. The situation will get worse as the state’s population soars, and worse yet when the next multiyear drought hits. Even so, builders and others are ganging up again in an effort to kill legislation that would require developers to show proof of an adequate water supply before they break ground on developments of more than 200 homes.

The electricity crisis should have taught the state Legislature the need for more careful foresight and planning. Lawmakers need to resist lobbying pressure from the building industry and approve a pair of good preventive measures.

One is Senate Bill 221, authored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) and scheduled for a critical hearing and vote today in the Senate Agriculture and Water Resources Committee. The bill--rejected twice in the past two years--has increasing support now, including from the state attorney general’s office, the Farm Bureau and a variety of environmental organizations. But the potent opposition includes the real estate and building industries, the Chamber of Commerce and manufacturers.

In the free-wheeling past, California assumed that enough water would be found to furnish the needs of growth. Even now, some of the opponents of the Kuehl bill say the solution is merely to build more reservoirs to expand the water supply. The state has tentative plans for new water storage projects, but even if the financing is found, it may be 10 to 20 years before some of these reservoirs can be built. Even after that, farmers and other nonresidential users could claim the lion’s share of the new water capacity.

In these days of growing shortage, it is folly to begin construction of any housing development that does not have a certain water supply that will see it through the multiple-year droughts that are common in California. The committee should approve the Kuehl bill without any of the proposed crippling amendments that will be offered, ostensibly to “improve” the measure.

The second bill that demands approval is SB 610. This measure, by committee Chairman Jim Costa (D-Fresno), also comes before the panel today. It would eliminate loopholes in a present law, authored by Costa in 1995, requiring planning agencies to consider water availability when including prospective major developments in their plans. A study indicated that the agencies were mostly ignoring the law.

Both of these measures are essential. The Costa bill would encourage better long-range development planning. At the end of the planning process, the Kuehl bill would assure that no houses would actually be built without the water necessary to serve them. Opponents are trying to make the issue complicated. It’s really quite simple, and entirely reasonable.